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Listening to Obama, Thinking of Bush

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg August 31, 2010 5:21 pmAugust 31, 2010 5:21 pm

One of the trickiest tasks President Obama will face in addressing the nation on Iraq from the Oval Office tonight will not be explaining his policy or the troop withdrawal. It will be the matter of whether – and how – to mention former President George W. Bush.

Mr. Bush, of course, was the architect of the 2007 troop buildup – the so-called surge – that helped stabilize Iraq when it seemed to be spiraling into bloodshed and civil war. At the end of 2008, just as he was leaving office, he signed an accord with the Iraqis – negotiated by his aides – that called for troops to withdraw by the end of 2011, a policy Mr. Obama is now pursuing.

Mr. Obama telephoned Mr. Bush on Tuesday morning, and the two men spoke briefly. But their call was private, aides to both said, and no details were released. Nor will the White House say whether Mr. Obama plans to mention Mr. Bush in his remarks.

But if the two presidents aren’t talking, their partisans are.

Mr. Obama has been busy this election season campaigning for fellow Democrats by criticizing Mr. Bush, and Bush loyalists regard Tuesday’s telephone call as something approximating chutzpah – especially given that Mr. Obama opposed the surge when he was a senator. Nor are they particularly happy with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said recently that Iraq “could be one of the great achievements’’ of the Obama administration.

Republicans spent Tuesday e-mailing reporters with remarks Mr. Obama made when Mr. Bush announced the surge, including the comment that he was “not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there – in fact, I think it will do the reverse.’’

The White House, however, says Mr. Obama always believed that a troop buildup would alter the security situation in Iraq, but argues that other factors – including the decision by Sunni tribal leaders to abandon the insurgency and work with coalition forces – are equally responsible for the turnaround.

In an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Stephen Hadley, who was national security adviser to Mr. Bush, made the case that the former president does indeed deserve credit, though he was careful to also praise Mr. Obama for not withdrawing troops too hastily, despite his campaign promise to end the war.

“I thought I owed it to the former president that somewhere out there somebody gives him some credit and points out that he’s the one actually that started withdrawing U.S. troops and he’s the one that set up the framework for both a long term relationship with Iraq and a December, 30 2011 end date,’’ Mr. Hadley said in an interview.

Even if Mr. Obama does mention Mr. Bush in his remarks, Republicans are not likely to be satisfied; they say they would view it as too little, too late.

“Some of what’s going on is Obama attempting to appropriate credit for a policy that he vociferously opposed,’’ said Peter Wehner, a White House adviser under Mr. Bush. “It would be gracious if he did acknowledge Bush but we learned a long time ago that Obama is not a particularly gracious man.’’

President Obama drew criticism on Thursday when he said, “we don’t have a strategy yet,” for military action against ISIS in Syria. Lawmakers will weigh in on Mr. Obama’s comments on the Sunday shows.Read more…